Essendon legend James Hird is giving back at Prahran JFC

A group of “experts”, including AFL legend James Hird,is providing the platform for one lucky junior club to build a successful long-term future. Here’s how.

Club president Ben Apted calls them the experts.

A program at Prahran Junior Football Club – established by mainly Wayne Oswald and Gab Suriano – was initially designed to have footy experts lay a strong foundation for its junior players, but it has since developed into much, much more.

Now alongside Oswald and Suriano is Essendon great James Hird – and previously Collingwood legend Nathan Buckley – who are helping the club’s push to implement a strong groundwork of skills early on.

Apted is rapt with how well the program is tracking and hopes his club’s investment keeps a Sherrin in the hands of future generations.

“It’s pretty cool, it’s good for the kids,” he said.

“We decided to appoint a director of development, which was someone who has significant football coaching experience at junior and senior levels.

“There are a lot of pathway programs out there but as a community club, we want to make sure we have a really strong focus on all kids.

“That context is important when you have people like James (Hird), Bucks (Nathan Buckley) and there’s quite a few others that are involved.

“It’s really important to make sure in those early groups, your under-8s-10s, they’re being taught how to kick, catch and how to do the ground ball gets.

“It’s certainly a lot more than having the celebrity, ex-AFL players and coaches involved, it’s very much about people who actually know how to teach a kid to kick and catch correctly.

“We’re hoping the strong focus and right people in coaching is going to keep kids in footy for longer.”

The skills program in motion.

What sets the Prahran program aside is the investment in each and every individual, the program has multiple facets that assists in every footballer’s needs.

“When we talk about being a community club, we mean we want to develop all kids who decide to have a go at footy,” Apted said.

“It’s about recognising that some kids join to play with mates, some join to learn, some join to move right through the program to AFL level, we don’t want to be turning kids away.

“We want to be focusing on all kids, but each kid is different, so we believe we need to have a number of parts to our program to support different needs.

“The end goal would be to have as many of the kids that decide to join our club to still have a footy in their hand when they finish school.”